Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Headlines Wednesday 29th July 2009

2Day ask rape victim for sex confession

2DayFM breakfast crew The Kyle and Jackie O show were left red-faced today after a lie-detector quiz about a 14-year-old’s drug and sex habits revealed that she was raped at age 12

'Curry basher' jailed for murder
A MAN who kicked a university researcher to death for fun while out "curry bashing" gets 15 years.

Robbers kill eight in $4.6m bank heist
GUARDS were undressed, gagged and shot in the back of the head in a suspected inside job to raise money for bombings.

Ambos to wear face masks
All paramedics across New South Wales will now have to wear face masks and goggles when treating patients to stop the spread of swine flu.

Girl wedged between train and platform
A teenage girl is fighting for her life after she became wedged between a platform and a train in an horrific peak-hour accident at a Melbourne railway station.

Kent pleads guilty to terror charge
Melbourne man Shane Kent faces up to 15 years jail after admitting membership of a terrorist group and his involvement in preparing a terrorist act.

Don't shun abuse victims, NT judge warns
A high-ranking Northern Territory judge has warned Aboriginal communities not to threaten victims of abuse or protect the perpetrators.

Dad killed 4yo 'to avoid child support'
A father hurled his daughter off a 36-metre cliff to avoid paying child support, a prosecutor said on Monday during the man's murder retrial.

Lin family plead for info about murders
Devastated relatives of the murdered Lin family have made an emotional public plea for information, saying the smallest clue could help solve the gruesome killings.

Cops nab 12-year-old drug dealer
German police said on Tuesday they had caught a 12-year-old boy in possession of more than 150......

Gnomes find good homes
About 1,500 garden gnomes have been saved from the scrapheap after an 800-kilometre rescue mission.

'I didn't know I married a terrorist'
A woman arrested in connection with the July 17 hotel bombings in Jakarta had no idea her husband......

Doped mum took kids for picnic on road
A mother was so doped up on Valium she took her children into the middle of a busy road for a fast food picnic, a court has heard.

Police shoot cleaver-wielding actor
A New Zealand actor who starred in police training videos has been shot after lunging at officers......

Woman jailed over sex abuse of daughter
A Perth mother who sexually abused her disabled teenage daughter has been jailed along with a male......

Melbourne Uni calls for redundancies as GFC bites
The University of Melbourne, the latest victim of the global financial crisis, is about to shed 220 jobs through a voluntary redundancy program. The job losses, amounting to about three per cent of the university's 7,500 staff, are expected to cost around $15 million. They are among a number of measures designed to save $30 million a year. - So many lefties, so few jobs. - ed.

Girl escapes from van man in Sydney street
A teenage girl has wrenched herself free from a man driving a van who grabbed her in a suburban Sydney street, police say. The 14-year-old girl was walking along Penshurst Street at Beverly Hills in southwest Sydney about 11amtoday when a white van passed by.
=== Journalists Corner ===
Emergency surgery for healthcare reform?
What McCain would cut out and add in to the president's ailing plan!
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Judgement Day!
Sotomayor faces the Senate! How will her controversial rulings play out this round?
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Is It Legal?
Fired for marrying an adult actress! Can you be let go based on who you end up with?
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Pelosi's Promise!
Can she really get the votes to pass the healthcare reform? Greta gets the inside scoop from Washington!
=== Comments ===
WOMEN PUT IN THEIR PLACE
Tim Blair
Britain’s collapse continues:
Women police officers are being issued with headscarves to wear when they visit a mosque.

They are expected to put the scarfs on shortly before they enter the mosque, in keeping with Islamic custom.
Assistant Chief Constable Jackie Roberts looks particularly happy in her new suppression hat. What Britain really needs, of course, is coverings for women’s arms.
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SPARE CHANGE
Tim Blair
The NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change spent nearly $2 million on petrol to keep its 989 vehicles rolling during the last 12 months.
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Sack him. And call the police
Andrew Bolt
Please, is there some way of holding not just the mother and the (alleged) rapist to account, but Kyle Sandilands as well?

AUTHORITIES are investigating a radio stunt in which a girl was strapped to a lie detector before revealing she was raped.

The girl, 14, was peppered with questions about whether she had ever had sex before she broke down on the 2Day FM radio station hosted by by Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O, revealing the rape ordeal she endured at the age of 12…

Under pressure from her mother to reveal if she had ever had sex, the girl broke down and revealed she had been raped.

Sandilands’ first response to the horrifying revelation was, “Right, is that the only experience you have had?” The segment briefly continued with the girl’s mother admitting she knew of the rape before Jackie O intervened and shut the segment down.

Vile, vile, vile. If the police aren’t speaking to the mother already, what’s keeping them? As for Sandilands and his sidekick, sack them, ban them, whatever. The station is saying the stunt went wrong, but in what possible way could it have gone right?

And for God’s sake let the authorities get the help to the girl that she so badly needs.

UPDATE

Listen to the audio (first link) to hear just how gross - how utterly barbaric - the segment was even before it went “wrong”. First, the girl’s mother, sounding excited, says she has brought in her daughter for the lie detector test to check if she’s telling the truth about “drugs and sex”. She “might have had sex before”, mum tells the world, and she’s “smoked marijuana”. Already the segment has gone way, way over the line.

But the girl is hooked up to the detector, monitored by a man called Charles. Then this:

Jackie O: All right, we have her hooked up to the lie detector.

Sandilands: Awwww.

Jackie O: She’s not happy! I just saw her listening to that replay.

Sandilands: How are you, Rachel?

Girl: I’m scared. It’s not fair.

Jackie O: It wouldn’t be fair on any kid, I tell you, I sympathise with you

Sandilands: Is that true, Charles, is that true?

Charles: That is true.

Sandilands: She is scared, everyone, yeah.

Jackie O: Yeah. Mum, you have a series of questions you’re going to ask your daughter, and, Rachel, you reply either yes or no and then it will be picked up on the lie detector whether you are telling the truth or lying.

(Rachel is asked whether she’s wagged school. She denies it, and the lie detector registers a lie. The girl protests she’s telling the truth.)

Jackie O: OK, what’s your next question, Mum.

Mother: OK, Have you had sex?

Girl: I’ve already told you the story of this… Don’t look at me and smile because it’s not funny. (Shouts:) Oh, OK … I got raped when I was 12 years old.

(Silence)

Sandilands: Right. (Pause.) And is that the, er, is that the only experience you’ve had?

Mother: I only found out about that a couple of months ago. Yes, I knew about that.

Girl: And yet you still ask me the question.

Mother: I was, the question was, have you had sex, other than that.

Jackie O: Rachel, I’m really sorry, we didn’t actually know that that was the case, and I think we might actually abort this segment, I had no idea that you’ve been through that, so I’m really sorry, and we’ll just let you off the hook, I think, I think it’s best not to continue. Are you all right? It’s okay, you just take a breather, it’s fine. We always have counselling services here, Rachel, if you need that. Have you had any counselling over this issue?

Mother: No, she has not.
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Aborigines lose their green halo
Andrew Bolt
The Green Savage myth has been so seductive to activists and compassion-advertisers. Take Terry Roberts, then South Australia’s Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation:

All Aboriginal people are environmental ists. They are the original environmentalists.

How popular this reinvention has been, even when the facts were a bit too stubborn:

Lesley Head (1990) and Lee Sackett (1991) have analysed constructions of Aboriginality by conservationists. Both argue that some conservationists have created an image of Aboriginal people as ‘noble environmentalists’, and then used deviation from this image as evidence of corruption:

As they saw it, the people they had backed as original environmentalists turned out to be mere shadows of their ancestors. For the conservationists, it was not a case of the model being wrong; rather the Aborigines themselves were a disappointment.
Hmm. So how much of a disappointment are our “original environmentalists” to today’s more dictatorial ones, given their objection to green-pleasing new laws in Queensland to ban development of their rivers:

But Wilderness Society member Anna Christie was not moved by the Cape York Aborigines’ message.

“I am aware of the dispute between the Aboriginal people and the environmental movement up there particularly, but I have to say environmental sustainability comes first,” she said.

Which turns Aborigines from green pets to green slaves, as Aboriginal protesters rightly point out:

Two giant koalas led a group of Aboriginal people in chains through the entertainment district of Sydney’s Fox Studios.
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Did the ice freeze Greenpeace’s brain?
Andrew Bolt
And so Greenpeace sent a ship off to the Arctic to protest against the melting ice and the fossil fuels that are to blame. From the ship’s log:

The sea ice is chasing us into the bay of large icebergs.... For the first time in this trip we do some real icebreaking… At first, it is pretty easy going. With 90% power on, we are just able to break through the 50cm ice. Then we have to stop, back up one ship length, and charge at it again. And again. And again.... Icebreaking is time consuming and sucks down tons of fuel.

UPDATE

A short primer from Dr David Evans on why Climate Change Minister Penny Wong still can’t show the world is warming, even though she’s given up on atmosphere temperatures, and told us to check sea temperatures instead. Conclusion:

The climate alarmists had to switch from air temperatures to ocean temperatures because by 2009 too many people are aware that air temperatures have been dropping since 2002 and that the warmest recent year was 1998. This latest position is possibly the last roll of the dice in the alarmist’s grab for political power and results, because if the long term pattern holds then the next decade or two will show cooling.
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What right to kill churches?
Andrew Bolt
Peter Costello on the bigotry of Victoria’s anti-discrimination police and their censorious masters:

Now, discrimination statutes don’t apply to religious organisations and their schools on the grounds of freedom of religion. So a parliamentary committee has recommended options to extend the power of the state over the province of religion. One proposed change is to restrict the freedom of religious schools to choose their employees on the basis of their religious faith....

Parents who choose to send their children to a Christian school have a reasonable expectation that the child will get a Christian education. How could the school fulfil its obligation to the parents if it is required by law to employ non-Christian or anti-Christian teachers to provide it? If the law demands this you might as well close down the concept of a Christian school - which might be what some of the critics intend.

And worse may be to come:
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Wiser than Obama
Andrew Bolt

When Barack Obama’s playing of racial politics costs him the votes of black police officers, he’s in real strife.

Very impressive character witnesses for the police officer Obama slimed, by the way.
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Green power is just cash for unions
Andrew Bolt
Alan Moran works out the price of Kevin Rudd’s plan for more green power:

THE renewable energy bill now before the Senate proposes that 20 per cent of electricity be derived from renewable sources.

This would offer no advantage to Australia while crippling the competitiveness of our energy supply. Based on the cost premium required for wind, the least uncompetitive available renewable source, and the bill’s penalty costs on electricity retailers, the proposal requires energy at double the cost of commercial sources.

On average this would raise the average cost of generated electricity by 10 per cent and impose a deadweight loss on the economy of $1.8 billion per year.

And this is even before the price of Rudd’s colossal emissions trading scheme is included.

So who is Labor actually helping to make rich by this new law, and the fat premiums it’s forcing consumers to pay for no gain at all?

Pacific Hydro… is investing $2 billion in wind power in Australia, and has 98 of the 116 generators now operating in Victoria. The company is owned by a funds manager that in turn is owned by 40 industry superannuation funds such as Cbus, TWUSuper and AustralianSuper. Half the boards of these funds are typically union officials, picked by the ACTU and industry unions.

UPDATE

Resources Minister Martin Ferguson admits:

Every four months, from now until 2020, China will build new coal-fired power stations possessing the same capacity as Australia’s entire coal-fired power sector.

Terry McCrann does the sums:

We can close down what is to all practical intents and purposes our entire power industry - give or take a few dams in Tasmania and thousands of all-but useless wind turbines - and the emissions ‘saved’ would be spent in China in four months…

Give or take one or two ‘Australian industries’, depending on how things play out in practice, it will build 25-35 Australian coal-fired power industries by the 2020 that is promoted as the interim date for substantial reductions in global carbon dioxide emissions.

Of course, we should praise Ferguson for his honesty in demonstrating so clearly how useless are green plans to… er… Well, McCrann tries to finish Ferguson’s article for him:
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Rudd’s intellectual rort
Andrew Bolt
Paul Kelly has little confidence in Kevin Rudd’s intellectual honesty:

What is the lesson for Australia from the present crisis?

Rudd has written two essays on this subject. In the first he attributed the crisis to unrestrained free markets and neo-liberalism and called for a new epoch based on social democratic capitalism. This is a popular Labor Party position.

Its problem is that there was no such era of neo-liberalism in Australia. Rudd’s economic advisers know this. Treasury deputy secretary David Gruen was honest enough in his recent Sydney Institute speech to say: “Certainly I cannot recall any time over the past several years when an Australian policy-maker has extolled the virtues of leaving the financial system largely to regulate itself.” Not one. Yet this was Rudd’s precise definition of neo-liberalism…

In Rudd’s second essay last weekend he focused on the recovery and offered the paradigm of “the building decade” as the overarching political theme… But can Rudd be serious in arguing that nation building is the main policy lesson from this event? Rudd boosts this idea from schools to national broadband but the ongoing financial foundations for such nation building will be limited and must be tied to financial rates of return to avoid large-scale rorts…

In his second essay, Rudd rightly focuses on the need to withdraw the stimulus over time, retire debt and look to productivity.... (T)he return-to-surplus pledge dictates what Rudd calls “unpopular decisions” as federal spending is kept to 2 per cent in real terms for many years.

Last week Access Economics described the task in these terms: “...You may be surprised to know that, after 4 1/2 years, the cumulative impact of the 2 per cent real rule will be devastating. It would, for example, be the equivalent cost savings from abolishing the Defence Department, or it would be the equivalent of the savings the government would make from lifting the age pension not to 67 but to 107.” ...

UPDATE

Ross Gittins is falling out of love:

In the short time he’s been in office, Rudd has established a record of over-promising and under-delivering.

One of his greatest weaknesses is an inability to set priorities. He has a thousand things he wants to do and problems he wants to fix, and while he’s focused on fixing something, it’s his top priority. He invariably claims the fix he cobbled together is the biggest and best in ages. But then he moves on and something else becomes top priority.
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The workers, united…
Andrew Bolt
If they do this to each other, heaven knows what they’ll do to a poor boss:

Police were called to the headquarters of the Health Services Union No. 1 branch after a tussle involving the national secretary, Kathy Jackson, and her arch enemy, state president Pauline Fegan. Last night Ms Jackson obtained an interim intervention order against Ms Fegan, saying she now feared for her safety and would press charges.

Ms Fegan in turn accused Ms Jackson of starting the fight and wrote to the union’s national executive, calling on it to immediately stand down the national secretary for ‘‘abusing and assaulting members’’....

Ms Jackson told the Melbourne Magistrates Court that when the tug of war started, the two officials yelled out for Ms Fegan to help.

‘‘The scuffle then went to the bottom of the stairs where from behind [Ms Fegan] grabbed me in a headlock and broke my necklace,’’ she said. ‘‘I have bruises and marks ...”
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Battle of the buses
Andrew Bolt
Perth produces another measure of a growing barbarity:

Attacks on buses have soared from 856 to 1379 in the past two years.

I really don’t think the same old Kumbayah is the answer:

``The most important thing to do is engage the youths in effective treatment programs based on restorative justice,’’ Dr Indermaur said.
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India takes us at our racist word
Andrew Bolt
The Rudd Government is rightly furious:

News channel Times Now broadcast a program on Monday about the treatment of Indian students in Australia. It was called ‘‘Yes, It’s Racism’’ and was followed by a website feature yesterday titled ‘‘Take this, Mr Rudd’’…

On Monday, the ABC’s Four Corners program revealed an Indian journalist who was working undercover on this issue had been attacked. The reporter said the attacker appeared to be Indian, but that detail had scarcely been reported in the Indian media.

The victim is astonished:

“I’m just very, very appalled with the Indian media assuming that this was a racist attack,” said the reporter, a 28-year-old long-time resident of Australia who covertly exposed migration scams for ABC TV’s Four Corners. “It was absolutely not. My attacker looked like an Indian person and I was threatened in Hindi.”

Appalling, yes, and dishonest. But why attack Indian media for doing what we do ourselves?

After all, it was Kevin Rudd who formally apologised for stealing Aboriginal children for racist reasons, when no one can find even 10 such victims. It was the Howard and Rudd Governments which gave Baz Lurhmann $80 million to help make and promote Australia, a film which claimed we stole Aboriginal children and sent them to face Japanese troops, when in fact we rescued and evacuated them. It was again government bureaucrats which helped finance, distribute and show in schools the film Rabbit Proof Fence, a “true story” about our stealing of Aboriginal children that was in fact false - and hypocrital. And now we have the Eddie McGuires, Fiona Stanleys and the like who see racism where, if anything, the evidence suggests the opposite of what they claim.

If we’re angry at Indian media for lying about our racism, know this: they do nothing that we don’t do to ourselves.
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Labor’s state of mate’s rates
Andrew Bolt
It sounds over-the-top, yet Tony Fitzgerald has seen this closer up than most:

QUEENSLAND’S pre-eminent corruption reformer Tony Fitzgerald QC broke two decades of silence to warn last night that the state was sliding back to its “dark past”, in a speech that savaged deals between so-called Labor mates, business and government.

Mr Fitzgerald reserved his harshest criticism for former Queensland premier Peter Beattie, now ensconced in a $490,000-a-year position as the state’s Los Angeles-based trade commissioner, suggesting that Mr Beattie’s election in 1998 had been the trigger for him to move to NSW.

Speaking for the first time on the reform process since he delivered his ground-breaking report on police and political corruption in July 1989, Mr Fitzgerald blasted the “ethics” of the current and former Labor governments. Secrecy was re-established by “sham claims” under which documents sought through Freedom of Information provisions were placed off limits by being run through cabinet.

“Access can now be purchased, patronage is dispensed, mates and supporters are appointed and retired politicians exploit their connections to obtain ‘success fees’ for deals between business and government,” Mr Fitzgerald said in an address at Brisbane’s Griffith University before the inaugural Tony Fitzgerald lecture.

Whether you think that goes too far, even after the jailing this month of former Beattie Minister Gordon Nuttall for corruption, Bligh is surely right to review this very dodgy practice:
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What, no bicycles?
Andrew Bolt
From NSW:

Of the Department of Environment and Climate Change’s 989 vehicles, only 38 are hybrid Toyota Priuses.
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She’s Aboriginal
Andrew Bolt

How bracing to hear Olga Havnen, co-ordinator of the Combined Aboriginal Organisations of the Northern Territory, complain last night’s on SBS’s wildly skewed Liberal Rule that wicked John Howard had forced Aboriginal people (like her) to join mainstream society.

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